Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: In honor of his upcoming title fight against Godzilla, we’re looking back on the most significant starring vehicles for the Eighth Wonder Of The World, the giant ape to rule them all, King Kong.
King Kong (1933)
What’s the single most influential movie ever made? There are countless possible answers to that question, none of them objectively correct: Intolerance, Metropolis, Citizen Kane, Jaws, on and on. With Hollywood having shifted almost exclusively to big-budget, F/X-dominated action/sci-fi tentpoles, however, the original King Kong looks more and more like the granddaddy of them all. Admittedly, there are even earlier examples of the form; Kong itself was heavily inspired by (and crafted by some of the wizards as) 1925’s silent dinosaur adventure The Lost World, for example. But it was arguably the first movie that truly synthesized various elements of cinematic spectacle—everything that the movies could do, in the analog age, to make viewers’ eyes widen, jaws drop, pulses quicken—and sustained that rush for virtually the entire length of a feature, at the expense of everything else.
Not that the giant ape shows up right away, mind you. Like Jaws’ great white, Kong is strategically withheld for a while, as the film introduces its three major players: Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), a film director famous for his recklessness in seeking real-world thrills to capture on celluloid; Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), the woman he selects to be the star of his next picture after randomly encountering her on the street; and Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot), first mate of the Venture, upon which Denham and his own crew sail to an island so mysterious that it doesn’t appear on any official map. King Kong’s cagily sedate first third consists largely of breezy Depression-era banter, establishing Denham as a man who’ll take any risk to get the footage he wants and developing an amusingly blunt romance between Ann and Jack. “Say, I guess I love you,” Jack eventually blurts out, apropos of nothing in particular. “Why, Jack!” she protests. “You hate women!” His deathless reply: “Yeah, I know. But you aren’t ‘women’.”
Kong begs to differ. The movie abruptly kicks into wowza! mode shortly after the Venture arrives at Skull Island, as natives—or early Hollywood’s racist idea of natives, anyway—kidnap Ann (whose blond hair amazes them) and substitute her for their planned human sacrifice. An astonishing cavalcade of violence follows, as Kong proceeds to kill the entire rescue party, excepting only Denham and Jack, while also doing battle with multiple dinosaurs that inhabit the island. Nearly a century later, the stop-motion creatures and rear-projection landscapes no longer fool the eye as seamlessly as they once did, but that doesn’t make King Kong’s relentless action sequences any less exciting. (Some credit also goes to Max Steiner’s rousing score, a landmark in the field.) The Hays Code hadn’t yet been adopted in 1933, allowing for more genuine horror than one might imagine could have been possible at the time; much of the carnage wound up being cut just a year or two later, and was only rediscovered in the late ’60s. The most notorious sequence, in which giant spiders feast on men Kong has shaken loose from a log into a ravine, has never been found, though Peter Jackson created an approximation based on what little exists.
For those who’ve only seen the subsequent remakes, it may be surprising to discover that no emotional bond ever develops between Ann and Kong in the original film. The beast is obsessed with the beauty, but Wray famously screams her way through the entire ordeal, never developing an iota of sympathy for her simian captor. Yet there’s still something poignant about the climactic aerial attack, as Kong, standing atop the Empire State Building, gets riddled with bullets and eventually plummets to his death. Maybe it’s the suggestion that he breaks free from his chains on the Broadway stage because he mistakenly thinks that photographers snapping their flash bulbs are attacking Ann, or maybe it’s just that the size of the Empire State Building makes Kong look more vulnerable, less imposing. Either way, a franchise was born—Son Of Kong would hit theaters less than a year later—and a thrill-ride approach to cinema was solidified. As Holly Hunter’s character says (more sardonically) in Broadcast News: “Well, you’re lucky you love it—you’re gonna get a lot more just like it.”
Availability: King Kong is currently streaming on HBO Max. It’s also available for digital rental and purchase from Amazon, Google Play, Apple, YouTube, Microsoft, Redbox, Fandango Now, DirecTV, and VUDU.
86 Comments
During the pandemic I have, when possibly, used Friday nights to watch old movies that I either haven’t watched or it’s been so long I have forgotten them. Planning on watching this King Kong soon. Should be fun.
I put on the HBO Max version while doing some chores recently, and I was pleased by how good it looks. Old movies on streaming services are so hit-or-miss (especially movies as old as this one), but it looks like they’re using a recent restoration.
King Kong is nearly 90 years old and still holds up. What other movie can make that claim? (None.)
I rewatch this movie every Thanksgiving eve, because as a kid in the 80s WOR out of NY would show this, Son of Kong, Mighty Joe Young and an assortment of Godzilla movies during the Thanksgiving holiday. I looked forward to it every year and have continued the tradition well into adulthood.
Son of Kong is more fun than it should be, I think. It’s such a trifle compared to the first one, but the baby Kong is so adorable and Robert Armstrong seems like he’s having a blast.
Yes! In my childhood, that Channel 9 stretch made Thanksgiving as a holiday (and also accounted for like 90% of my WOR viewing for the year).
WOR and the million dollar movie! Howdy neighbor!
I see your Million Dollar Movie and raise you a Four-Thirty Movie on WABC!
And the After School Specials on ABC!😎
When Son of Kong was first shown on WOR they usually opened the film with the final reels of King Kong starting with Kong in chains & on stage. I imagine this was done to pad out the short running time of Son of Kong. This was during the late fifties , early sixties & it was much later that I caught the original in its complete form.
As a kid in suburban central CT in the 70s and 80s, I had access to those same NY/NJ stations through our cable service. The Godzilla movies marathon were must see tv for me.
As a kid in suburban central CT in the 70s and 80s, I had access to those same NY/NJ stations through our cable service. The Godzilla movies marathon were must see tv for me.
As a kid in suburban central CT in the 70s and 80s, I had access to those same NY/NJ stations through our cable service. The Godzilla movies marathon were must see tv for me.
My favorite bit of trivia that I’ve read or seen someplace, is that the Kong model’s fur was particularly problematic during the stop motion sequences, because it was constantly shifting as they adjusted the model (almost like how you can “draw” on velvet). It turned out to be one of those happy mistakes though, because in the final product it looks like Kong’s fur is bristling. Pretty cool stuff. I haven’t seen the movie in years, maybe I’ll throw it on HBO Max one of these days (after I get through mandalorian, wandavision, the expanse, falcon, etc.).
Yep, the fur prints ended up looking great!
The Kong puppets used rabbit pelts for fur. On Mighty Joe Young they developed a technique for transferring the hair from a calf embryo to rubber skin.
Specifically they were worried until they showed some text to execs and one of ‘em said “Ooh, Kong is mad, look at him bristle!”
“Rippling muscles” is how Ebert described it, and I think that’s as accurate a phrase as any.
Hey Peter Jackson, I can watch this film twice in a row and not be the slightest bit bored.
Halfway through your version, I’m watching the clock.
I thought that Jackson’s could use some trimming. The seaman learning to read subplot comes to mind. That the ape and Naomi Watts became friends really seemed believable. No one ever explains how they get the ape onto the boat. Better hurry before the drugs wear off…
I liked Jackson’s version, but it was obviously FAR from flawless. I appreciated it for a lot of reasons and there were still some scenes that were just absurd, like the film crew fleeing among the stampeding dinosaurs.
“Pumpernickel” hehe
Indeed.I got to the end, once.Once was enough, even with Naomi Watts.
I took my niece to see it when it came out, she was around 9 or 10, and about 45 minutes into it, she leaned over and whispered “are you sure we’re in the right movie?”
It truly is still so damn impressive. And so rewatchable. I have always thought that, to this day, this film has to have very few rivals in just how shocked and amazed it left its first audiences.
As a kid, I would always look forward to King Kong on the WOR Million Dollar Movie.
I looked forward to once a year King Kong vs. Godzilla showing up on local television. I was so enthralled by it that I did not notice for years that the voices had been dubbed and the words did not match the mouth movements.
Thats got to be a version of the intro from the seventies or later. I’m more familiar with the movie clap board intro from the fifties & sixties.
I taught my son young that old black and white movies could be things of wonder, not something to be shunned. The result was that when we went to see Jackson’s version of Kong in the theatre when my son was eight, he had already seen the 1933 version a couple of times, and his verdict when we came out of the theatre was ‘The old version was better.’It is such a crackerjack of a film, and the years have not diminished it. I listen to the soundtrack a lot, and the version I have incorporates a lot of the dialogue. It never fails to astound me how beautifully Steiner’s score blends with what’s on screen. At a time when movies had long stretches of silence, music-wise, as people figured out how to do music in films that weren’t musicals, Steiner’s music underscores a lot of dialogue-free scenes. When the island chief comes down the steps upon seeing the crew from the Venture, for example, the score echoes his steps. This was such a revolution that apparently some early audiences wondered where the orchestra was in the theatre; they couldn’t believe background music could be incorporated like that unless it was live.Ruth Rose, the wife of Kong’s producer/director Ernest Schoedsack, was brought in to do rewrites on the film, and is credited with the streamlining that makes the movie clip along. She had been on various expeditions around the world, including one as historian on a zoological trip to the Galapagos, and used a lot of her knowledge in the early scenes setting up the Venture’s expedition.There’s so much great dialogue, such as the bit near the beginning where Denham has failed to get a woman to go with them on the trip. When he’s told it’s too dangerous, he replies that there are women in New York that night who are in far more danger than they would be with him, to which Jack says ‘Yeah, but they know that kind of danger.’ Then, when discussing the expedition and how great it will be, Denham declares ‘They’ll have to think up a lot of new adjectives when I get back.’And I love the two little throwaway bits from audience members before the New York premiere; the grand old lady who is disappointed it’s not a film (“I thought I was gonna see something!’), and the young woman who is told by her partner that the event is about some kind of big ape. As he says this, another man is pushing clumsily past the woman, and she says sarcastically, ‘Gee, ain’t we got enough of them in New York already?’Even though the special effects aren’t as seamless as they once were, they’re visceral, in a way that CGI still hasn’t been able to manage. And the original doesn’t have an ounce of flab; unlike the Jackson version, which I think uses up the entire running time of the original before they even get to the island (maybe it just seems like that). The two things I really liked about the Jackson version were the clever homage to the original film and Steiner’s music before Kong’s premiere, and his wonderful re-creation of the (sadly, probably lost forever) spider pit sequence from 1933, which was a by-product of the remake, and to my mind the best thing that came out of it. I’d love to see a version of the 1933 film that cuts in Jackson’s spider pit sequence, just to get something of the feeling opening night audiences had in 1933.
I’m pretty sure the spider sequence was never shown to audiences, despite Jackson & co’s superb detective work figuring out where it must have gone.
It was in previews, but the audience reaction convinced them to cut it- the audience was so shocked that they weren’t really paying attention to the following scenes.
That is one sharp 8-year-old. Well done.
I love the cinematography. So misty and romantic and lived in. P.J.s version is very well done but just too sharp and clear.I also never liked his Ann. Too much of a pro.
I’ve also done my best to instill a love, or at least an appreciation, or at least a lack of disdain, for black and white movies in my own son. (Of course I showed him the 1933 King Kong at a young age.) The process was helped by my recounting of something I overheard at a screening of Natural Born Killers, which opens with a B/W shot: one of the two bros sitting behind me groaned “Oh no! Schindler’s List!” Laughing at those guys with my son made him realize just what kind of jerks didn’t like black and white.
I’m wondering if the Son of Svengoolie show ever featured this on one of their broadcasts. They should, someday.www.svengoolie.com
Maybe make it a double feature with The Most Dangerous Game, shot with much of the same crew and two of the same actors as King Kong during that movie’s downtime.I also want to single out animator Willis O’Brien for recognition; his work on the stop-motion miniatures is almost certainly the key to this movie’s success and longevity.
There’s a waterfall setpiece in GAME that can be glimpsed in long shot as a matte painting in KONG.
They built the Most Dangerous Game sets extra big so that they could do some preliminary work on Kong while the first movie was in production, and then move in when it finished.
I credit O’Brian, Harryhausen, and Eiji Tsubaraya for a lot of my love of sci-fi, horror, and creature features. When I was a kid, there weren’t a lot of Godzilla films easily accessible on home video, so I wore out these two clip movies that were just compilations of old monster movie trailers. I think one was called Fantastic Dinosaurs of the Movies. There was just so much creativity in the old stop-motion and suitmation productions that often feels missing now. It’s hard to capture actual weight with CGI.
I would scour the TV guide for any Godzilla/giant monster movies every week. I wish I still had my old vhs TV recordings from back then.
Yup. Also went through TV Guide as a kid looking for any genre type of viewing… and to see if the Six Million Dollar Man had a Bigfoot appearance … or was a rerun.
The first movie I ever saw. My mom let me stay up past midnight to watch it on Flint’s “Christopher Coffin” late night horror movie show. It has lost none of its luster in the years since and remains the gold standard for adventure movies.
King Kong and Wizard of Oz shaped my tastes in popular culture. My love of comics, horror, Lovecraft, King, DC, D&D, etc all spring from those two movies.
I think it was Salman Rushdie who claimed that every movie made since THE WIZARD OF OZ has been influenced by it.
I wouldn’t doubt it. King Kong and Oz captured my imagination at a young age. Both movies are technical marvels for their time, both are edge of your seat thrill rides, I cried when Kong died, I cried when Dorothy returns to Kansas (spoilers).
I liked Korda’s Thief of Baghdad.
I saw “Kong” on the big screen a few years ago, and was struck by how modern the pacing felt. From the point the rescue party reaches the jungle, it’s non-stop action until the last scene.
I love the way the fight between Kong and the dinosaur looks like a proto-UFC match.
Willis O’Brien had been a boxer, and you can see it in that sequence.
The son of kong cave bear fight shows off a lot of this as well.
Someone please explain to me:1. Island still has actual dinosaurs on it. I do not care.2. Island has a giant ape on it. That, I gotta see.
Mmm, monky.
If you mean the in-story logic… Denham and his crew have no idea what the hell is on the island until the moment they see Kong. They only know there’s something impressive. The few people who survive the mission have found out there are also dinosaurs, but at that point there’s no way they’re going back there – they have this giant ape that they managed to knock out, and for Denham’s purposes that’s plenty cool enough; he’s not interested in paleontology or anything.If you mean why is the movie about King Kong and not King T-rex… the short answer is that the writer was into gorillas and wanted to do a monster gorilla movie, and the dinosaurs were added in because they figured Kong should live in some kind of prehistoric monster land and this was a familiar idea from pulp adventure books like The Lost World. But also, they wanted it to be a monster people would think of as a character and not just a force of nature – like, when he’s fighting other monsters, you naturally root for him – which is easier with an ape than a lizard. The original designs gave Kong more human features.
Trying to preserve that logic (as well as his inherent geekery) is probably part of why Jackson chose to do his version as a period piece. Updated versions have to deal with the dramatically different sensibilities of later eras. If you discovered Skull Island today, you’d just cover the place with webcams.
In the sense of paying customers. In no version that I recall does anyone have any interest in dinosaur-based profit, which I believe was very popular in a different franchise.
Expect maybe a 10 year old John Hammond, who thought “maybe one day I’ll build a park filled with these creatures?”
I loved the documentary on producer Merian C. Cooper that TCM ran a few years back: “I’m King Kong! The Exploits of Merrian C. Cooper.” I would love to watch it again some time but I can’t seem to find it streaming anywhere, and if TCM has re-run it lately I’ve missed it. Cooper had been a World War I pilot and then was sort of a real-life version of Armstrong’s character, traveling around the world doing these part-documentary, part-fictional films. After “King Kong,” he produced a lot of John Ford’s films.
One thing I heard is that Cooper put himself in the movie playing the machine gunner on the plane that puts the fatal shots into Kong causing him to fall from the Empire State Building.
Yes! I’ve read that too.
It’s on the special edition DVD of the 1933 version of Kong that came out in 2005 (the same one that has Peter Jackson’s recreation of the spider attack).
One of the best movies ever. It’s worth dwelling on the score. In the days of early talkies, a lot of movies would have music under the titles and maybe at the end but almost none the rest of the time, the assumption was you didn’t need to score movies wall to wall like in the silent days. Kong didn’t just have an extensive score, it was very closely matched to the action, in a way that only cartoons were doing otherwise. There are a few movies before it that were ambitious with their music but this was the most influential. (This is also one of the earliest sound films I can find which had a proper isolated soundtrack album.)
It was standard practice for the theaters to hire organists and pianists to play live music while the silent film was playing.I had the unique experience of seeing Abel Gance’s silent film classic, Napoleon, at the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. back in the 80s. Francis Ford Coppola had spent years tracking down as much of the lost movie as he could find. He didn’t find quite all of it, but he found enough to present a complete movie. Maybe the most special part of the experience was seeing the movie accompanied by a live orchestra conducted by Carmine Coppola, who’d written the score. This is the poster I bought at the time.
Am I the only person seeing Michael Caine in that poster?
Yes.
Birth of a Nation would seem to be more influential than Intolerance, even if the latter is Griffith outdoing himself in the former.
Also there appears to be no love for Hell’s Angels. Hughes truly broke ground filming the aerial sequences and was pretty successful in it’s own right.
I’m not going to argue with a straight face that the portrayal of the islanders isn’t racist, but this is a way different kind of ethnocentric mythology than Birth of a Nation. The islanders do exactly one bad (from the protagonists’ point of view) thing: they kidnap Ann Darrow, because they need a sacrifice and they’d rather not kill someone from the village if there’s a choice. But they’re not evil or stupid and they’re extremely good at the main task that matters: keeping all the giant monsters out of the village. Denham comes along and utterly fucks up everything, resulting in tons of his people and theirs getting killed, but as soon as that door is breached everyone’s on the same side during the emergency – there’s some nicely directed action there, where as soon as the village leader realizes what’s about to happen, he starts signaling everyone to forget about fighting the white idiots and just deal with Kong. The attitude is more from the kind of colonialist pulp fiction where “natives” are dangerous but also have some kind of mysterious civilization that the heroes are clueless about.
THIS. We have to stop using the rules of the present to judge the past.
This is actually an excellent point. It’s the white invaders who upset the balance of the island and essentially wreck their entire village (I have to imagine that the islanders were probably subsequently massacred by dinosaurs now that their wall has been breached by Kong).
Obligatory mention for the 1976 version; it had its moments. Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange had some sweet chemistry, and I will watch a pissed off Charles Grodin in anything. Oil company as the bad guys putting Kong into advertising, not a bad move.
It’s a far inferior movie, but the ’76 Kong is still pretty great, and is easily one of my favorite movies of all time.
If I am changing channels and stray into it, I am definitely staying. Defines “watchable” for me.
I remember remarking that early 2000s Jeff Bridges appeared to have not aged a day from King Kong Jeff Bridges.
I’ll go to bat for the ‘76 version. Its nowhere near the original, but I rank it above the Jackson version. Fantastic score.
I think one of the reasons this movie has remained so popular with generations of kids is because the set pieces read like scenarios a couple of 7 year old boys would come up with while playing with their toys in a sandbox. “And then the giant gorilla fights… a dinosaur! The rescuers get attacked in the boat by… a sea monster! Then the giant gorilla gets mad and… smashes and eats the villagers! Then he climbs…the Empire State Building! And airplanes shoot at him!”
stop motion > man in a suitand that’s why I’ll always cheer for Kong over Godzilla even if they’re both CGI now, unless a man in a suit Kong fights a stop-motion Godzilla, and then I’ll have to rethink my loyalties
I never thought that I ever needed to see a giant ape knock a dinosaur out with a right cross but then I saw this movie. My life would have been incomplete.
Kong’s right cross is such an underrated iconic film move. Glad to see it getting so much love in the Godzilla vs. Kong preview.
Despite being a film made more like a silent picture than a sound one, I’m always startled how well it moves, with a solid, leisurely start more like a Busby Berkeley musical shifting into a developing of the menace on the voyage to the island, to a terrifying reveal that is the equal (and probable superior) of ANY monster movie (others, like Alien (the fully-grown alien, that is), Godzilla, The Thing, etc. do so in bits and pieces – King Kong has the monster part the curtains of the jungle and walk right at you), and it keeps moving, fast but steadily, right to a first-rate finish.As good a film as it could’ve been. One of the greatest, ever.
This, rather than a Bunuel, was my surrealist father’s favourite film. What he particularly loved was the way Kong’s size changes from scene to scene. In some shots, he has almost plausible dimensions, but in others, he’s a colossus.
What is a “reigning grandaddy”?
The scene where Kong derails the train is still amazing, I can’t imagine the impact at the time …
The stop-motion work in this film was truly pioneering. I only saw this original King Kong film for the first time about 5 years ago, but I was in awe of the stop-motion effects work for the time it was made. I do think Peter Jackson’s CGI-fest is a good movie, if flawed and overlong, but the ‘33 original really does beat it easily. I haven’t seen the 1976 version with Jeff Bridges/Jessica Lange, but I see that it is also on HBO Max now…guess I know what I’ll be watching this weekend.
Something something Banksy banana…
The moment right before Kong falls, where his head sags & you can see the “How did it come to this?” look cross his whole body, is fucking Shakespearian. Not to mention the way that his body bounces off the side of the building as he falls. Absolutely horrifying.